Steam games forum down amid hack fears

Computer games outfit Valve has suspended its Steam user forums following unconfirmed reports of a security breach.

Eurogamer claims that the official message board for Valve's Steam online games platform, Steampowered, was "defaced" on Monday night shortly before the site was suspended.

It is believed the defacement involved inserting a prominently displayed message promoting a site called FknOwned.com, which offers video game hacks, as captured in a screenshot of the gaming site here. This wasn't a simple case of link-spamming, but an out-of-place ostensibly promoted topic on the forum.

In addition, some gamers reported the receipt of spam emails promoting fkn0wned, supposedly from Steampowered.com. This would imply that hackers may have got their hands on email addresses or at least accessed a way to send messages via the Steampowered board, but this remains unclear.

The Steampowered forum remains suspended at the time of writing on Wednesday morning, with the usual discussion threads and information replaced by a holding message.

The Steam Forums are temporarily offline for maintenance. Your patience is appreciated.

There's no evidence to suggest that Steam accounts have been breached. However in the absence of any official word from Valve on the incident, you can't blame gamers from being more than a tad concerned.

The apparent breach of Valve's online forum is the latest in a string of security slips affecting video game developers this year, the most notorious of which led to the weeks-long suspension of Sony's PlayStation Network following a hack attack that exposed private information on million of users back in April. ®